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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Rivers with heavy vegetation are hard to map from the air. Here we consider the task of mapping their course and the vegetation along the shores with the speciﬁc intent of determining river width and canopy height. A complication in such riverine environments is that only intermittent GPS may be available depending on the thickness of the surrounding canopy. We present a multimodal perception system to be used for the active exploration and mapping of a river from a small rotorcraft ﬂying a few meters above the water. We describe three key components that use computer vision, laser scanning, and inertial sensing to follow the river without the use of a prior map, estimate motion of the rotorcraft, ensure collision- free operation, and create a three dimensional representation of the riverine environment. While the ability to ﬂy simpliﬁes the navigation problem, it also introduces an additional set of constraints in terms of size, weight and power. Hence, our solutions are cognizant of the need to perform multi-kilometer missions with a small payload. We present experimental results along a 2km loop of river using a surrogate system.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Field Robotics Center

Associated Project(s): Riverine Mapping

Number of pages: 8

Text Reference

Andrew D. Chambers, Supreeth Achar, Stephen T. Nuske, Joern Rehder, Bernd Manfred Kitt, Lyle J. Chamberlain, Justin Haines, Sebastian Scherer, and Sanjiv Singh, "Perception for a River Mapping Robot," Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '11), September, 2011.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Chambers_2011_6894,
   author = "Andrew D Chambers and Supreeth Achar and Stephen T. Nuske and Joern Rehder and Bernd Manfred Kitt and Lyle J. Chamberlain and Justin Haines and Sebastian Scherer and Sanjiv Singh",
   title = "Perception for a River Mapping Robot",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '11)",
   month = "September",
   year = "2011",
}

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